That plague-y nursery rhyme

I had the Bubonic Plague/”Ring around the rosy” talk with my kid the other day.

He’s almost 9. It was time.

Needless to say, he was stunned by the alleged meaning of the childhood rhyme. And it’s age.

As many adults know, “Ring around the rosy” was popular around the time of the Bubonic Plague in England. The Black Death first raged in London from 1348 to 1350 and is thought to have killed one-third or even one-half of the population at that time. It came back during Shakespeare’s time, between 1563 and 1603, wiping out a quarter of London’s population all over again. It was a caused by a germ transmitted through the air and by infected fleas and rats. According to history.com:

Today, scientists understand that the Black Death, now known as the plague, is spread by a bacillus called Yersina pestis. (The French biologist Alexandre Yersin discovered this germ at the end of the 19th century.) They know that the bacillus travels from person to person pneumonically, or through the air, as well as through the bite of infected fleas and rats. Both of these pests could be found almost everywhere in medieval Europe, but they were particularly at home aboard ships of all kinds–which is how the deadly plague made its way through one European port city after another.

Ultimately, the Bubonic Plague killed more than 25 million people across Europe, more than one-quarter of the continent’s entire population. And some scholars believe the famous childhood rhyme that kids still sing — or at least know, I don’t recall actually singing or chanting this to my kid — describes the symptoms and rudimentary treatments of the disease, which could send healthy people to their graves in a matter of a days. Now, there are many versions of the rhyme and many interpretations. (Plenty of people don’t believe the rhyme has anything to do with the plague. I am not one of those people.) Here’s a basic read:

This t-shirt is crazy.

Symptoms of the plague included a ring-shaped rash around an infected area (Ring around the rosy), and it was common to fill pouches or pockets with herbs to ward off the infection (a pocket full of posy). Typically, the bodies of the afflicted were burned after death (Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.)

“Mom. Are you kidding?” my kid asked. “It’s about people getting sick and dying?”

4 Responses

Fun thing I learned from At Home by Bill Bryson: It didn’t really have much to do with rats! The fleas are the key, but the fleas were spread by all sorts of animals including rabbits. Rats just look gross and so people think they’re harboring all kinds of diseases (which they are, but so are humans).

Well, of course there’s Camus with “The Plague.” LOTS of historical fiction has bubonic episodes – without re-reading a bunch of used paperbacks it seems like two of them are Wilbur Smith’s “The Blue Horizon” and Follet’s “Pillars of the Earth.” Smith doesn’t fit the historic parameters above and Follet may not, but there were local outbreaks for a longtime afterwards. I do know Bernard Cornwell’s “The Heritic” which I re-read recently has a scary two-survivors-out-of-the-beseiged-castle plot device. Nothing like surviving the plauge to make you think maybe the priest who condemned you might have been wrong!